I was thrilled to win a copy of The Book of Audacity on the excellent website AudioTuts+ recently. It was a great excuse to become more efficient with this amazing free software program. My audio editing tasks are usually done using Ardour, a more feature-rich open source program dedicated to multitrack recording and production, but sometimes, if all you need is to do is make a few quick edits, Audacity is an easy choice. A certain amount of technical knowledge about Audacity is also a wise choice for any audio geek. It's free, open source, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and if you are the musician in your group of friends, there is a high chance that someone will come asking you for help using it one day. So far I haven't been reading it in a very linear fashion, which I think I best. I can't imagine ever getting around to experimenting with all of the features Audacity has to offer, but I did have a look at the chapters on Making Your Own Ringtones, Transferring Vinyl LPs to CD, and Becoming an Online Star, the latter being an unexpected perk in a book that I had assumed would be mostly technical tutorials and explanations of digital audio.

Planning your rise to fame

Becoming an Online Star, feels more like a follow up to the previous chapter on Creating Podcasts, but for me was significantly more helpful. Plenty of amateur musicians and podcast creators these days have the wherewithal to start up a new audio editing program and figure out how to put some tracks together, and online tutorials can help if you run into problems, but how to best distribute and advertise yourself on the internet is the real question. The Book of Audacity contains a wealth of good suggestions on this topic. The most informative part for me was the rundown of Online Music Distributors, which provides decent easy to understand advice and statistics for a variety of the most popular sites, accompanied by info on how to self host your own storefront.

In addition..

…the book contains a great deal of information on various customizations for Mac, Windows, and Linux, and at one point sparks some interesting debate on the merit (or perceived merit) of vinyl over digital media. It also fulfills it most basic function of being a wonderful and more importantly, optimistic and fun introduction to creating audio of just about any type. Recommended for both beginner and advanced audio folk. Though I think beginners will find it most helpful. Go get it now and do something cool with Audacity!

maxBreakwell.com - Music, Sound Design, and Multimedia Experiments

For the past month I have been participating in the RPM challenge, which in their words is,

Record an album in 28 days, just because you can.

What is considered to be an album is either 10 songs or 35 minutes of music. I was shooting for 35 minutes and fell pretty short of the mark.

It’s quite a tall order for if you have other responsibilities in your life. I could imagine it being not so difficult had I been able to retreat to a secluded studio somewhere, or taken a few weeks off of work to dedicate my mind, body, and soul to the task at hand. I knew I would not have these luxuries, but I also don’t think that is the point, nor do I think most musicians, amateurs or professionals alike, have these luxuries.

For me, I was enticed by one of their poster’s tag line,

What if every musician you knew put their music first for 28 days?

Sometimes it seems there is an infinite list of reasons for musicians to put almost any other aspect of lives before their music. I decided to take the month of February this year and spin that list right around. Equally important to the challenge I had with myself was an understanding that their would never be a “good” month to do this, or some magical distraction free place to run away to, and that the next step for me as a musician was to realize that fact and embrace it. In this case, by attempting to put 35 minutes of music on and CD, during the shortest month of the year, without taking any days off work, and mailing it to New Hampshire.

Side-note:

I once saw an interview with Smokey Robinson where he talked about writing a song everyday just because he can. I’m sure there are thousands that never make it onto a record, but he did point out that he doesn’t “have to go on top of a mountain” somewhere so he can work, it’s just a simple part of his day and life. I’m not a huge Smokey Robinson fan, he wrote some great hits no doubt, but that particular aspect of him I respect most.

Positive Effects

Despite throwing in the towel mid-last week when I realized there was no longer a chance of having 35 minutes of music finished, I still feel that some good things came from the experience.

1. Workflow: Having an upcoming deadline forces you to stop tinkering with your setup and start producing material as fast as possible. The RPM challenge is a good way to put your DAW workflow strategies to the test and also realize how they can be improved.
2. Writing Every Day: Get yourself in the habit of spending every free minute enjoying the life of a composer. Doesn’t matter how you do it, record it, sing it, write it down on staff paper, program mathematical algorithms, or just draw some abstract shapes, you’ve got to be creative every day.
3. Form and Completion: This is the one that gets me. I’ve always had more ideas on the table than finished products, but again, that deadline looming over you forces you to figure out how to build on those random bits of inspiration and give your pieces form and structure.

Finally, here are two of the more “finished” sounding pieces that I was working on during February. They are both just one part songs which feature more free guitar improvisation than solid melody, but I hope you enjoy anyway.

The first song is temporarily titled Egypt 2011 because I had been watching news reports of the riots before sitting down to record this one. I tried to give it a dark feel.

/*See post to listen to audio*/

The second song has the working title of Tuesdays which I got when added the melancholy horn lines on a cold dreary Tuesday afternoon. The whole tune ended up having a slightly more wistful feeling than I was really going for, but I guess I can live with that.

/*See post to listen to audio*/

maxBreakwell.com - Music, Sound Design, and Multimedia Experiments

Most of the emphasis in reviews of Amp Sim apps these days seems to focus on tone, and the application’s ability to achieve, with flawless accuracy, the nuances of the classic gear we all love.

This obsession with perfect tone in software is a bit misguided at times. With the $60 I spent on AmpliTube for iPhone and iRig, I was mostly interested in a practice solution that didn’t disturb my neighbors, or wake up my girlfriend late at night.

I got exactly that, and the tone was pretty decent considering that I was playing my Gibson ES-135 into my phone.

In addition to being able to upload your own songs and loops, one extraordinary feature that caught my eye was the SpeedTrainer slider. This allows you to slow down the tempo without changing the pitch of whatever song you are working on, perfect for uploading and practicing with Aebersold tracks.

After ripping my Aebersold Vol – 54 – Maiden Voyage CD, I transfered the files through iTunes file sharing, slowed down the beginning of Song for My Father to about 0.6x the original tempo, and set out woodshedding those triplet runs, then speeding the tempo up slowly as I improved my ability to nail each one.

I tried this on both my iPhone 4 and my iPod Touch 2nd Generation. The iPhone 4 could slow down the track considerably without too many added pops and crackles, but the iPod Touch really couldn’t pull it off so well. Depending on your device your milage with this may vary.

Obviously, tone and sound quality is important, even just for practicing, but it seems like recent debates on apps like this one tend to leave out equally important factors, such as realistically how are you going to be using this product?

Maybe some people are interested in using Amp Sim software for live performance, but I feel like they are in the minority, and even that minority is probably using more powerful devices than an iPhone.

Playing your guitar directly into your iPhone will probably never sound like, or feel like a Mark I Mesa Boogie, but it can provide awesome practice tools that make ironing out those little kinks in your style a breeze.

maxBreakwell.com - Music, Sound Design, and Multimedia Experiments

All of my previous projects have come to a dramatic halt these days while I spend more time educating myself with some real programming skills.

Not having a lot to show for the past couple months, I thought I’d simply share my opinions on some of what I believe are the best book/tutorials available for those looking to dive headfirst into computer programming, creative code, and/or interactive media installations.

First off, the book that is essentially responsible for allowing me to think that I have any business whatsoever writing any kind of code:

Learning Processing by Dan Shifman

All of the information in this book is so clearly laid out. For those who aren’t familiar with a programming language yet, this is probably the best resource to get you started. Even though the book is specific to Processing, for beginners it provides a very solid background in the most important aspects of the writing code, minus the hassle of learning lower-level languages.

I should mention that most of the books available on Processing are worth the read, however Learning Processing seems to be especially geared to explaining programming to beginners.

Currently, I am working my way through:

Programming Interactivity

Programming Interactivity is a book meant for designers not computer programmers. It’s focus is more concerned with seeing your interactive design ideas come to life rather than being a crash course in oF, Arduino, and Processing. I enjoy how the author presents some theoretical ideas on the theme of each chapter before getting into the nuts and bolts of the associated code, as well as some transcripts of interviews with some creative code pioneers.

If you have previously read, and fully internalized, Learning processing, most of the Processing Examples will seems like review, however, this comes in pretty handy when looking at the oF and Processing code side by side.

Sometimes reading a long explanation of what one line of code accomplishes seems exhausting. I found it much easier to grasp the oF syntax through looking at an example of the same program written in Processing first.

I must point out here that I am aware of many major difference between the two languages and this type of side by side comparison is not always possible, or even the best way of understanding what is going on. Maybe it is just my weird learning style, but when possible, I found reading the processing code first, then looking at the some program in oF was the quickest way for me to grasp what was going on.

Before Reading

If you plan on reading and following the examples in Programming Interactivity, do go ahead and bookmark the errata page. There are more than a few mistakes, which is really the only criticism that I have for this book. If you are completely new to programming in general, as I am, it also is worth your time to look at some basic tutorials on oF as a supplement to the book itself. Particularly, one by Zach Gage, who has created some of my favorite iPhone apps.

For graphical programming languages,

such as PD and Cycling 74′s Max/MSP/Jitter, I would recommend looking at the tutorials that come bundled with the software itself first before moving on to any other resources.

I’ve had much more experience working with Max/Msp than PD, and on this blog I have often linked to one of my favorite Max/MSP resources, a set of tutorials by Peter Elsea which has helped and inspired me quite a bit. These tutorials were written for Max4 and are starting to look a bit dated, but the amount of knowledge they contain makes them well worth the read.

The Cycling 74 website also has an amazing tutorials section, which relatively recently got a nice makeover. I would highly recommend checking out the series of tutorials by Gregory Taylor on using LFOs as midi pitch generators. Once your finished with those, check out my versions of his patches, and then go create something awesome of your own!

Learning how to put Pure Data to better use has been a task that I can’t seem to pull of the back burner. There are a few good reasons for using PD as opposed to Max/MSP. Other than it being free, a knowledge of PD will allow you build RJDJ scenes, which was what made me decide to finally give it a try.

Other than the documentation you can find on the PD website I would also recommend a book by Andy Farnell called:

Designing Sound

The sample chapters that you can view for free should give you plenty to work with, and even though the book deals mostly with PD, the concepts involved will help anybody interested in computer audio. There is even a wiki page dedicated to re-creating the examples from his book in SuperCollider.

iPhone Resouces

I’ve posted quite a bit of projects on this blog using Max/Msp and TouchOSC as a way of creating nice looking iPhone interfaces for a variety of purposes. This is a pretty good solution because it frees me from having to learn Objective-C and creating my own UI interface, but it also leaves many things to be desired.

• Max/Msp is expensive and many people prefer PD, SuperCollider, or other programs
• Not everyone wants to run a program in the background just connect route the TouchOSC messages properly
• Native Apps are always more desirable

As a result I’ve begun to look into iPhone programming and so far there’s been a few good resources that I’ve found. There is a great new site on the Envato network, MobileTuts+, which also has some tutorials on Android devices as well. AudioTuts+ is my favorite and highly recommended so I am expecting a lot from this new site. I haven’t gotten too far with Objective-C so far, but I recently got a copy of Learning iPhone Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building Your First iPhone Game (Developer’s Library), which has been a good introduction. It’s a little off subject since it deals with developing games for the iPhone, but its simple approach has been quite informative for me, and fun.

Feedback Please

That’s about everything that has been keeping me awake nights recently. If there are any other great books or tutorial resources that you feel should be mentioned, then please leave a comment. I hope that everyone can find something new here to keep them busy and learning new things.

maxBreakwell.com - Music, Sound Design, and Multimedia Experiments

…to anyone who visited my site over the past couple weeks. I was hacked and I wasn’t able to get around to fixing the situation and setting up a new site until yesterday.

Everything should be fine now as far as I can tell. Google has taken down their malware warning on my site too. Things have been extraordinarily busy in my personal life recently, but you can expect some new posts and projects to be coming out over the next couple weeks.

Please Stay Tuned,

Max

maxBreakwell.com - Music, Sound Design, and Multimedia Experiments

After too long a delay I finally finished my first version of a TouchOSC based transport for Ardour. One of the most difficult aspects of this project was the sheer number of Ardour’s functions that can be controlled via OSC. Deciding what to incorporate into the layout and what to leave out took hours of consideration and experimentation. I tried to keep everything as streamlined as possible only using using functions in my layout that I thought would be of the most use.

As I discussed in my previous post, you will need to run Max5 patch in the background to allow better communication between TouchOSC and Ardour. Please go ahead and download the .zip file which contains the TouchOSC layout, .maxpat file, and a .mxf file as well.  Even if you don’t own Max/Msp/Jitter, the patch should work fine using the Max/Msp runtime version, which is free to download.

First, run the Max5 patch and you’ll see a very boring screen that looks like this:

Like the window says, there isn’t much to do other than to just run it in the background and have fun, but there are a few things to be aware of. Make sure TouchOSC is using the correct ports. You can change them in the patch window or on your iPhone/iPod Touch. If you are using your home’s wifi internet connection you probably won’t have to change the Ardour IP adress or the iPhone IP address, but if you setup a direct network between your computer and iPhone then you will have to change these addresses in the patch window.

The labels on the TouchOSC layout should be fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll show a picture here of each page and briefly describe what everything does.

Page 1 (displayed above)

Play — Toggles the play button

Loop — Toggles the Loop button for playback and recording

Rec — Toggles the transport Record button (In order to actually record to a track, that track must also be record enabled)

Red Fader — This will control level of whatever track is listed first in the editor view

Add mark — This will add a mark at the location off the playhead

Prev. Mark & Next Mark — Moves the playhead to the previous or next mark

Stop — Stops playback and recording

Start & End — Moves the playhead to the Start or End marker

RW — Rewinds Track

FF — Fast Forwards Track

Red Dial — Scrubbing

Save, Undo, & Redo — Saves file, undoes the last action, redoes the last undo

Page 2

Punch In – Toggles the ability to use a Punch In marker while recording

Punch Out — Toggles the ability to use a punch Punch Out marker while recording

Nudge — These two buttons will nudge the playhead back or forward by the amount of time selected in the Snap Mode section of the transport. I believe the default amount of time is 5 seconds

Snap Modes – Scroll through the options: Grid, No Grid, or Magnetic

Snap Choice — Scroll through the various grid subdivision options: CD Frames, SMPTE frames, SMPTE seconds, SMPTE mintues, seconds, mintues, Beats/32, Beats/16, Beats/8, Beats/4, Beats/3, Beats, Bars, Marks, Region Starts, Region Ends, Region Syncs, Region Bounds

Edit Point — Scrolls through the options: playhead, marker, mouse

Toggle Visual State — You can use this multitoggle to save up to 12 unique grid views. With one of the toggles in the “on” position press the Save State button and the current visual state will be saved on that toggle button. You can then switch between saved visual states easily in your project.

Global Record — This button record enables all of the tracks. It would be nice if pressing it again would disable all of them as well, but unfortunately that not how this OSC command works with Ardour. What you see is what you get with this one.

Page 3

This page allows you to control the zooming parameters of your project. The purple focus buttons modify what Ardour will in zoom on. For example, pressing the mouse button, then repeatedly pressing the green In button would zoom closer in on the location of the mouse cursor.

In — Zooms In

Out – Zooms Out

Session — Sets the zoom so that the entire session can be viewed in the editor window

Region — Sets the zoom so that the selected region can be viewed in the editor window

RegionXY — *Use with caution* Sets the zoom so that the selected region fills the entirety of the editor window. The dangerous part is that I haven’t found and effective method of getting the screen back to normal. Pressing the Session or Region buttons won’t do the trick, but if you have saved a visual state you can get back by using the appropriate multitoggle button.

*I recommend using the 1st visual state to save the session view. This way you can use the RegionXY function and still get back to normal.*

Toggle – Toggles between the current and previous visual state

Center – Centers the playhead in the editor window

Playhead – Sets the Zoom Focus to the location of the playhead

Mouse – Sets the Zoom Focus to the location of the mouse cursor

Edit – Sets the Zoom Focus to the edit location

Page 4

Set Loop Edit Range – Sets the loop points to the area selected in the editor window

Set Loop Region – Sets the loop points to the region selected in the editor window

Set Punch Edit Range – Sets the Punch In/Punch Out markers to the area selected in the editor window

Set Punch Region – Sets the Punch In/Punch Out markers to the region selected in the editor window

Two Green Play Buttons – These buttons are a little confusing, and sometimes a little unreliable, but I still found them very useful. The top button will play from the mouse cursor position to the end marker, and then, move the playhead back to a selected edit point. The bottom button will play from the mouse cursor position to a selected edit point, or, from the selected edit point to the mouse cursor position. Understand? Just try it out while your editing some files. I found that it helped me out quite a bit.

Split – Splits a region file at the edit location

Crop – Crops a region to the selected area in the editor window

Raise – Raises the region above any other regions that may be overlapping on the same track

Lower – Lowers the region beneath any other regions that may be on the same track

Export – Opens the options menu for exporting the selected region

Naturalize – Moves the Region back to its original position

Normalize – Increases the amplitude of the region to its highest level before distortion occurs

Reverse – Reverses the region’s audio file

That’s about it everything. I did my best to create this layout with only the most useful commands, grouped together by page depending on what functions I though might be used together the most.

After using this layout last night for a few hours I felt good about my creation, but I do believe that I would like to make some adjustments and upgrades along the way. If there is anything that you feel is particularly good, or awkward about this TouchOSC layout, let me know and I’ll take everything into consideration for the next version I get around to making.

Until then, I hope that everyone enjoys using Ardour and TouchOSC together while editing and recording music!

maxBreakwell.com - Music, Sound Design, and Multimedia Experiments